Femme Fatale
(2002)
Review
by : Eric
Barker
Starring:
Rebecca Romijn-Stamos (Laure), Antonio Banderas
(Nicolas Bardo), Peter Coyote (Watts), Eriq Ebouaney (Black
Tie)
Written and Directed by: Brian De Palma
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The
heist of some rare diamonds during the Cannes Film Festival
goes horribly wrong, and not necessarily by accident.
 There
are three kinds of Brian De Palma movies: first, there’s...well,
Brian De Palma Movies, peculiar, idiosyncratic films in which
the director is the star, movies that swim in style and pastiche
and an almost overwhelming love of cinema for its own sake;
then there are Brian-Needs-the-Money Movies, big budget, all-star
Hollywood productions that have little to do with De Palma’s
usual concerns, and that have often resulted in jaw-dropping,
spectacular misfires like The Bonfire of the Vanities
(1990) and pure, wrong-headed show biz flubs like Mission
to Mars (2000); and finally, there’s The Untouchables
(1987), which was a Brian-Needs-the-Money movie that, somehow,
went spectacularly right.
His latest
film, Femme Fatale, falls solidly in the first category,
an unabashed Brian De Palma Movie that overflows with so much
visual style and lyricism it approaches symphonic dissolution,
an outrageous practical joke wrapped inside a conundrum cloaked
in the mercurial genre of film noir. Femme Fatale is maddeningly
improbable, relentlessly slippery, baldly indebted to Hitchcock
and Antonioni, and to David Lynch of all people, and to who-knows-who
else, including De Palma himself, and it is actually quite
a good time, his best entertainment since The Untouchables,
and his best film in his own private, professorial genre since
Dressed to Kill (1980).
Femme
Fatale is an almost impossible tangle of events and moments
which play on common audience assumptions, particularly the
idea that we know -- or more to the point, are able to know
-- what is going on around us. It is a key element of film
noir, and of noir fiction in general, or as
the great pulp writer Jim Thompson once put it, “There
is only one story: nothing is what it seems.”
As a practical
theory of storytelling, Thompson’s admonition could
almost sum up De Palma’s career; he may be the most
gleefully unreliable narrator in American movies. From his
groundbreaking indie film Sisters (1973) to the box-office
conquering Mission: Impossible (1996), even Brian-Needs-the-Money
movies are sure to have one or more sequences in which the
narrative veers without warning onto some new, disorienting
and objective track, and savvy audience members may come to
the uneasy conclusion that they’ve just been along for
the ride since the beginning. It’s easy to spot the
Hitchcockian influence in De Palma’s outstanding camera
work, his puzzling situations filled with elaborate action
and quiet mysteries, and his literal stalking of his characters
with a camera, sometimes for minutes on end.
But the
page De Palma really snatched from Hitchcock‘s book
turns out to be a constant exploration of moviegoing as voyeurism,
a theme upon which he’s been working endless variations
for decades. It’s no mistake that Vertigo (1958)
is De Palma’s favorite film to quote, with its seemingly
endless tracking shots of a detective-as-audience-surrogate,
following and observing a suspect with whom he finds himself
falling in love. De Palma continually announces himself, like
a sly carnival barker drawing us into his seedy tent with
the promise of seeing all kinds of forbidden fruits -- a packed
shower in the girl’s locker room, a frustrated housewife
boinking a stranger in a taxi, a pair of half naked super
models groping each other in a Cannes powder room -- only
to raise the curtain on a world we’d rather not contemplate,
full of people planning and doing very bad things to each
other, and implicating us in the dirty deeds with our own
urge to spy on strangers and neighbors. No other director
of the moment is so conscious of the audience as a major participant
in the movie-going experience, or so fascinated with film
as a peep show, a surreptitiously moving, changing window
to which we obsessively return, hoping to find some sort of
redemptive projection of ourselves, or at the very least some
juicy, private moment that is usually kept hidden.
Femme
Fatale delivers ten-fold on all of its promises, though
it is a narrative shambles. As the title suggests, the film
has a noir plot through and through, piling narrative twist
upon turn upon twist in an absurdity of double-crosses and
neon red herrings, intricate shams and bizarre coincidence,
fatal ennui and ego-piercing dialogue, and camp moments so
ballsy no one but De Palma would dare to put them in a contemporary
movie. But the whole idea of a plot becomes nonsense after
awhile, and the point is no longer who did what to whom, or
why, but just how many bravura sequences this star director
can weave together and sustain for the sheer joy of filmmaking.
Femme Fatale’s answer is: very many.
The first 45 minutes
of the movie are virtually silent, save for a purposely overbearing
score that steals shamelessly from Ravel’s “Bolero,”
while De Palma’s elegantly staged Steadicam shots weave
in and out and around a thoroughly frustrating heist, revealing
only what suits him, toying with our desire to know what is
going on without ever actually revealing anything we need
to know, like a practiced lover who knows all the right spots
to touch without ending anything too soon. That is, like the
title character, Laure, who appears to be able to seduce anyone,
of any erotic persuasion, within ten seconds of hello.
To bring out that
side of Laure, statuesque Rebecca Romijn-Stamos doesn’t
have to work very hard; her allure is self-evident, the camera
has always loved her. But De Palma has given her a few extra
dramatic hoops to jump through in this film and she clears
them easily, believably turning on the waterworks when she
needs to melt a skeptical heart, often playing Laure with
a jarring sense of humor and an unsettling grasp of how lust
can short-circuit the brain’s logic centers, if you
have the right mask. Her strip tease in a Parisian pool hall,
pitting two dim-witted suitors against each other, is an instant
classic, the funniest highlight of a constantly surprising
film.
Which
is not to say that Femme Fatale is any kind of meaningful
drama; it’s all artifice, an exultantly mounted trash
aria. It seems De Palma is in an unusually breezy mood these
days, and it sits well with his insistence on an excess of
style over substance. There has always been a certain amount
of winking in a Brian De Palma Movie, but in this film it
infuses every scene.
The welcome tone
is helped along immensely by Antonio Banderas, in a charming
performance as a camera-toting paparazzi with more enthusiasm
than wiles, and by the outstanding cinematography of Thierry
Arbogast (Luc Besson’s constant collaborator), who brings
a rich palette of light and glamour to the film’s Gallic
fantasy world.
Notes:
NICE TWIST:
Hollywood may have created film noir, a genre that many American
critics agree first crystallized with Double Indemnity
(1944), but the French named it, when fifties-era cineastes
like François Truffaut began spotting certain recurring
themes and motifs in a cluster of American movies made during
WWII. De Palma, keenly aware that he’s taking film noir
home, opens Femme Fatale in a Cannes hotel room,
with his protagonist watching Double Indemnity in
bed, and then proceeds to set the entire film in France.
CAMEOS:
Many prominent figures of the French film industry appear
as themselves, including director Régis Wargnier (Indochine,
1992; East-West, 1999) and actress Sandrine Bonnaire
(À nos amours, 1983, and Wargnier's East-West).
THERE
IS ANOTHER: De Palma’s second favorite film to quote
is Michelangelo Antonioni’s highly influential Blowup
(1966), in which a morally bankrupt fashion photographer discovers
he has captured a murder on film while taking random pictures
in a park. The polar opposite of a Hitchcock thriller, Blowup’s
protagonist is an enigmatic vessel for a film about modern
apathy, a search for clues that ultimately lead nowhere. Antonioni’s
films are characterized by hypnotic camerawork, a symbolic
use of color, and misguided quests for identity that dissolve
in a general cultural malaise.
THE SIGNATURE:
De Palma only steals from the best, but he does have one cinematic
signature that is all his, the extended split-screen sequence,
often showing us two different points of view simultaneously.
He is marvelously adept with the device, and his use of it
in this film will be totally lost if you rent the “full
screen,” pan-and-scan version.
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